On Saturday, people were horrified after news had broken that the members of the Youth Congress in Kannur, Kerala had slaughtered a cow in full public view in order to protest against the government’s notification to restrict the sale of cattle in the markets for slaughter purposes.
This led to a huge public outcry and the Congress party had to swing into desperate damage control mode with the Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi too condemning the incident on Twitter. The party looked like quickly distancing itself from the act and also suspended three Congress youth leaders in this regard.
Now reports are emerging that claim that this action of the Kannur Youth Congress leaders was not carried out in isolation as some act of indiscipline, but had the approval of the top state leadership.
Rijil Makkutty, the Youth Congress’s Kannur mandal president, who had led this ‘protest’ has claimed that he had informed about this decision to the Youth Congress state president Dean Kuriakose. Makkutty has claimed that he had informed Kuriakose on Saturday morning that he was planning to kill a calf. Makkutty further claimed that the President had not only raised no objection in this regard but had also wanted the youth Congress to strongly protest against the notification.
Makkutty also claimed that even though there were reports of him and two others getting suspended, the youth Congress had yet not received any notification in that regard. He has also stated that they had specifically chosen Kannur as it apparently had more space for slaughtering.
The State President Dean Kuriakose though is singing a completely different tune. Kuriakose claims that he had given no such specific instruction to Makkutty on how to carry out the protest.
It might be true that Dean Kuriakose had not give any special attention to Makkutty’s protest method as neither he nor his fellow Congress leaders might have anticipated the huge public anger which the issue managed to generate.
In Kerala, RSS workers are regularly killed by criminals and terrorists affiliated to leftist ideology, and those incidents neither get extensively reported in the media nor face a lot of public outrage. So the Congress leaders too might have assumed that the cow slaughter incident would go down this route.
Possibly after they realized the amount of damage it had caused, all including Rahul Gandhi spun into action in order to somehow diffuse the fire. They in this regard were aided by a section of media, which in its reports magically turned the slaughtered cow into an ox.